My Internship Experience…

The Old System: Lotus Notes email server with applications built on top of it

6 May 2010, Thursday

Went over to the company that developed the first version of the system for  the textile company.

It is a very old system built upon Lotus Notes. Basically they develop some simple applications to handle the documents generated from Sales, Purchasing, and Accounting.

Advantage of the system: it is a sequential way of doing things, ensuring that their work process flow is being followed (compare to relational database system).

Requirements that I gathered so far from the bosses of the textile company:

1. They face a problem of “decentralised accounting” with “heavy manual workload”
2. They would like a tracking system, to alert customers of any possible delays in their supply chain
3. They do not want to implement SAP (which would be an easy way out for me, I think)
4. They are looking at .NET platforms (come the era of web-based apps???)
5. They are not really sure what they want

Fact:

Using email servers (e.g. Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange) and developing applications on top of it, awkward as it may seem, is practiced by many businesses. I think it’s due to the ease of implementation.